Risk-taking, careful planning and steely determination are the hallmarks of this brash, outspoken and wildly succesful media mogul.

On the other side of the world his counterpart, Keith Rupert Murdoch, impeccably dressed, ruthless and hungry for success, began with one small Australian newspaper and parlayed it into 125 newspapers and magazines around the glove, the Fox, Inc., motion picture and television conglomerate, and news satellites on four continents.

These two men, controllers of much of the news and entertainment we receive every day, have long traded barbs and vitriolic attacks, creating an intense race for complete domination of the media. Turner and Murdoch are the major players in the media world today - and both have personal lives as complicated as their business dealings. Family squabbles, public divorces, high-profile romances, huge charitable bequests and their appearances at the most exclusive gatherings in the world have made both moguls entertainment news in their own papers and news magazine shows.

This meticulously researched look at media business is also a dual biography. In great detail it delves into both the personal and professional lives of these two outsize figures, their fierce competition, and their enormous effect on American daily life.

Amazon.com Review
What do Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch want out of life? Apart from the usual pleasures--love, fortune, good health--they apparently want to control the world's media. And, to judge by this account, each wants the other's head on a platter.

"In another time, they might have dueled on a grassy plain with muskets, or faced each other at high noon at opposite ends of a dusty street, holsters slung low on their hips," writes media/entertainment pundit Hack. Turner and Murdoch have chosen to fight it out, with undisguised venom, in a singularly public venue--Turner through CNN and other networks, Murdoch through Sky and Fox TV, plus a host of magazines and newspapers. Turner espouses liberal views while Murdoch is a hard-line conservative, but both are supreme "controllers of information" and "manipulators of public opinion," according to Hack. Their fight has cost billions of dollars, and it's wounded more than a few bystanders. It has also, as Hack rightly notes, set the tone for the contemporary press, for the worse, sacrificing journalistic integrity in the interest of two "competing political agendas ... until there is one."

Balanced, for the most part, if only because Hack seems to have little affection for either of his subjects, Clash of the Titans is a readable account of a private war between prideful tycoons with long memories. Media buffs will find much of interest in this portrait of "colliding storm fronts," both of whose reach extends far and wide. --Gregory McNamee